A cacophony of words, a rage of similes, and a dash of awkward poetry. You know, to keep it classy.

Category Archives: Life Chats

Post navigation

Sometimes I get a little pissy at the world in general, and call out people I hate and the dumb shit that they say. After that, I want to make it up to the world by reminding them (and myself) that there are people who I don’t hate who say lovely things on social media sites.

Everyone has a few people on the social medias that they used to work with/go to school with/met once at a party who you friended because you had a bonding experience, but you don’t expect to ever have a face to face conversation with that person ever again. Most of the time, it’s completely acceptable to let them hang around for a year or so, and then unfriend/unfollow/un-whatever them after they say something particularly stupid or obnoxious.

I happen to be lucky enough to have a few of these people who I refuse to get rid of, because they light up my news feed with some real gems. Such as:

After reading that article on Jezebel about gender-neutral baby clothes, and getting into some of the comments, where people said that everyone compulsively asks a baby’s gender, I think I’ve come to the decision that if I’m ever toting a baby around and someone asks if it’s a boy or girl, I’m just going to look blankly at them and shrug like I have no idea.

Love it. She also goes on to call babies “small sentient marshmallows that leak fluids”, so you know she’s fun to peek in on every now and again.

Anyone else find it creepy that Blanche called her father “Big Daddy”?#GoldenGirlsMarathon

Yes, it is creepy. And yes, I do love that I have friends in their 20’s who still marathon Golden Girls.

And I leave you with this lovely video, added by an acquaintance on Facebook. It’s pretty fantastic, and I would never have known about it if it weren’t for Facebook (which may be a goo thing or a bad thing, depending on your opinion of foxes and their vocal habits).

Recently, I was listening to a podcast by a friend of mine, in which she and her husband discuss pop culture tidbits and other awesomeness. I enjoy listening to podcasts to and from work, because it makes the drive go by faster and it makes me feel like I have friends in the car (it gets lonely, guys).

In the episode that I listened to the other day, though, my friend’s husband was discussing a book that he wrote (props to him, man) in which the main villain was an evil doctor. Because of this, he was referred to as The Doctor throughout the book, which caused a lot of negative feedback from people who are super fans of Doctor Who.

Now, fans of Doctor Who, or Whovians, are a special kind of fan, in that they are obsessive to the point of crazy, and highly defensive of negative ideas or portrayals of pretty much any character from the show (even villains can cause a soft spot in Doctor Who – Whovian life is not always black and white).

Because of this obsessiveness, I can completely see people taking his story the wrong way, being offended that the villain is called The Doctor (“How dare you use that name for someone evil!”), and hurt by the fact that he didn’t know that in Doctor Who, the main character is referred to as The Doctor, which is common knowledge for people who have see the show (but not common knowledge for anyone else).

Original photo co. BBCAlso, I just re-watched “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, and I absolutely love this line.

Now, I personally identify with Whovians, because I love a good story (and they really are fantastic in Doctor Who), but I can also see where he was coming from. Fans of Doctor Who can be crazy, and that can be a huge turn off.

I myself was hesitant to start watching Doctor Who at first, because I knew people who were so crazy in love with the show that I couldn’t imagine it to be that good, and I would only end up disappointed. I’ve been burned by crazy fans before (a former roommate told me to read Twilight, because “the story is kind of lame, but the writing is really good”. Lies.), and I wasn’t really looking to put myself out there for a show that I wasn’t already attached to.

So I get it – crazy fans are crazy, and they can easily turn people off of a show, movie, comic, book, whatever. It’s a fine line being a fan of something. You have to ease people into it, like stepping into a hot bath – dip their toes with a clip or two, and hope that it is comfortable enough for them to want to slip in.

The thing about fandoms is, people are always going to be fanatical about them. That’s the point – they love this thing so much that they can’t help but want to push it onto you too – they want to share their wonder with the people around them, so they can wonder together.

But shows are not the fandom – the boy who builds his own life-size dalek, the couple who have a Star Trek wedding at Comic Con, or the girl who writes erotic fanfiction of Supernatural and tries to publish it – they are not a representative of the thing itself, or even the fandom. They are the extremes.

So please, don’t judge a thing by it’s fandom – you could be missing out on something life-changing.

Have you ever had one of those moments in books where you get the overwhelming DESIRE to do something described in what you’re reading? I’m not talking about some food that sounds good (although that totally happens – the Turkish Delight from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Sounds delicious in the book! In real life, it’s basically just nasty covered in powdered sugar, and I am not the only one who feels this way.)

I’m talking about an itching need to do something you read about – something you would never do in real life, but you can imagine yourself doing it in a past life, and crave the feeling again.

Recently I was reading Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, where she describes a whole family of people who drink and chew tobacco and do all sorts of things that you would expect a family of hillbillies to do, and I got the urge to do something that I have never in my life wanted to do: smoke a cigarette.

The way she describes it, it just sounded so comforting and normal, like it was something you would naturally do (which is true for a lot of people, I guess). I was shocked at my urge to smoke a cigarette, because I come from not only a family of non-smokers, but a family that is heavy into the medical field (I have a lot of nurses in my family). I know that if I ever started smoking, I would get bombarded with factoids, pictures and other paraphernalia that is used to scare smokers into quitting. It’s never really been an option to me, and even at my most rebellious (which, lets face it, was nowhere near rebellious), I would never have even considered starting to smoke.

To me, it is a sign of an excellent writer that they can spark such natural desire in a reader to do something so uncharacteristic.

So, there’s this song that I’ve had the insane urge to listen to on repeat for several hours (and I have. Not for hours, but three or four times in a row). I’ve heard it before, but it never really struck me how beautiful it is until the other day.

The song is Measure the Globe, by Astronautalis, and you can listen to it here to understand its awesome:

If you’ve never heard of Astronautalis, he’s an awesome rapper/folk/rock singer guy, and I highly suggest you check out some of his other stuff (you can see it on YouTube, or buy it on iTunes if you’re really into him.)

Have you ever had one of those moments where you feel desperately, hopelessly failed by fiction? Where you read something on a book or saw it in a movie and just believed that it was possible? I realized yesterday that I had experienced one of those moments years ago, and never fully understood what had happened.

Like most people do on the Fourth of July, I went to see the fireworks. Waiting all evening for it to get dark, we finally got to see the sky light up with sparks and colors and visual noise. It was beautiful, it really was, but I realized last night that I’m always a little disappointed by fireworks.

English: Fireworks on the Fourth of July (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why? Because of fiction.

I read fantasy books as a child, where magicians can make fireworks look like dragons, or people, or anything they wanted, really. In my head I imagined beautifully sparkling figures in reds and greens and purples, sparking and fizzling until they were cloudy outlines of themselves.

They were beautiful, and in my head, I always expected real fireworks to be able to do the same thing.

In fact, it wasn’t until I had reached an age too embarrassing to admit that I fully realized that fireworks were spherical, not just flat circles. Logically, I understood it, but I didn’t realize it until I had the time to give it some thought.

At that moment, I understood that of course fireworks can’t be shapes; they’re just colorful explosions set off at a safe distance from the earth to awe the masses. And in my heart, I was disappointed. Not because the fireworks I saw each year weren’t pretty – they were. But they weren’t what I had always wanted them to be, and the things of fiction will never be possible in real life.

This was at my old old job, the first full-time job I had right out of college. I was working at a small family-owned company, where there were literally four of us (and I was the only one not family), so it was really laid back. Like, jeans and tennis shoes with a cat in my lap laid back.

My boss had bought his wife (who worked with us) some boots for Christmas, and had them shipped to the office (because why not?). To make the order large enough for free shipping, he added a pair of men’s dress socks for himself. (Why he decided on dress socks, I will never know, since the man lives in bleach-splattered t-shirts and Birkenstocks.)

When the packaged arrived, he opened the box and went, “Why did I buy these? These are awful!” Not knowing what awful thing he had inadvertently bought, I turned around to find him holding an awesome pair of argyle socks!

Nevermind the sensible black pumps.

Seriously, they’re fantastic.

Because I liked them so much, and because he would never dream of wearing argyle socks, my boss gave them to me.

Even though that relationship ended on a poor note (which is a whole other story), I still think of my boss and that job when I wear them. Which is a lot, because I only have about three pairs of work-appropriate socks now that I have to dress up every day.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you really need to talk to someone about something, but you don’t want to ruin it for them? Like, you already watched the next episode of a TV show, and something awesome happens that you want to discuss at length, but the person you want to talk to about it hasn’t seen that episode, so you just have to bite your lip, sit on your hands, and wait?

Damn you, George R. R. Martin.

I’m in the middle of that, and it’s going to last for several months, I fear.

I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones series for the past few weeks, along with watching the show on HBO with my man-friend. I’m finally at the third book, which is the part of the story that the show is currently at, so I was racing against the show for a while to read what would happen next before the next episode. I succeeded, but now I wish I hadn’t.

I just read something so big in the book, that I just have to talk to my man-friend about it. Unfortunately, he has just started the series, so he hasn’t read that part yet. Even more unfortunately, the show is done for the season, and they did not do THE BIG THING. This means that I will have to wait for him to read all the way through to this book to talk about it, and until then, I have to keep my trap shut every time he says something kind of related to THE BIG THING.